Menace2Sports: Moving 2.5 Years of Forum History to Realms.tv in 11 Minutes

We've worked with Menace2Sports on a few projects now, including keeping their Midwest Preview magazine locked down for paying members, and this time they came to us with a bigger ask. Their community has lived on a XenForo forum for years and they wanted to bring it over to Realms.tv without losing any of it. That meant every thread, reply, and private conversation needed to come over too.

So we built a tool that moves a XenForo forum into a realm with one command, and we ran a full test import on a copy of their forum to see how it held up.

A bit of background

Moving a forum to a new platform comes with a lot of risk and complexity. Posts can end up under one "Imported User" account, dates can reset to the day of the move, formatting can break, and images can still point back to the old server. On top of that, thousands of "new" posts can send a flood of notifications and emails to your members.

The good news is that we've done this plenty of times before, including some extremely complex migrations for communities with millions of posts. We're used to handling the tricky cases, and we treat member and engagement data with a lot of care, because there's almost nothing more important to a community than the conversations it's built up over the years.

Menace2Sports also has a subscribers-only section where most of their conversations happen, so we needed to make sure that content stayed behind the paywall on Realms.tv too.

The subscribers-only Midwest Preview forum on Realms.tv, locked behind a Subscribe prompt for non-subscribers

How it works (the technical side)

We built a XenForo add-on that acts as the control panel for the import. From there, admins can:

Map each forum to a new or existing post type in their realm
Choose who can read it: everyone, registered members, subscribers, or a minimum subscription tier
Run the whole import with a single command

Each Menace2Sports forum brought over to Realms.tv with its post count and who can read it, 240,939 posts in all

A few other things we made sure of:

Authors and dates stay the same. Every XenForo member is connected to their Realms account, so every post shows up under the person who wrote it with its original date.
It's history, not new activity. Imported posts don't send notifications, don't auto-follow anyone, don't show up as new posts, and skip the approval queue. Mentions still link to the right members but stay quiet.
Content looks the way it should. XenForo formatting is converted to the Realms post format, images are copied over to Realms instead of linking back to the old server, and links turn into rich embeds. If an image can't be pulled in, a placeholder shows up so it's easy to spot.
You can run it again. Re-running the import only sends posts that are new or edited, and if a run gets interrupted it picks up where it left off. That means you can do a test import while your forum stays live and then run a quick final sync on switch-over day.

A few quick stats

Of history preserved: 2.5 years
Posts moved over: 240,939
Total import time: 11 min
Notification spam from old posts: 0

The import brought over every thread and reply from all five of their forums, including the subscribers-only section, plus members' private conversations, which are now direct messages on Realms. The only posts that didn't come over were left out on purpose, like deleted or unapproved posts, redirects, and forums Menace2Sports chose not to bring over.

A private conversation from the Menace2Sports forum, carried over as a direct message on Realms.tv

Everything from May 2024 to October 2026 came over with its original date, and every member who posted on the forum kept their name on their posts. The whole import took about 11 minutes, and once it finished, reply counts, latest replies, and search were all rebuilt so the community worked right away.

The Menace2Sports General Discussion feed on Realms.tv, with forum threads under their original authors

Best of all, zero notifications went out to members. Since we were testing with real member data, we also added a switch that turns off all outgoing email for a realm during a test run, so nobody got anything in their inbox.

Import summary: 240,939 posts and 2.5 years of history brought over in 11 minutes with 0 notifications or emails sent

Why this matters

A forum's history is a huge part of what makes a community worth joining. Old threads answer new members' questions and give regulars a reason to keep coming back. A big backlog of content is also how a lot of communities get found in the first place, since those old threads keep showing up in search results for years. In a lot of ways, it's a community's biggest piece of advertising. Having to throw all of that away to switch platforms keeps a lot of communities stuck on software they've outgrown, and we wanted to make sure that wasn't something Menace2Sports had to worry about.

TL;DR

Menace2Sports wanted to bring 2.5 years of forum history over to Realms.tv without losing anything. We built a one-command XenForo migration, tested it on a copy of their forum, and everything came over in about 11 minutes with authors, dates, and paywalls intact and zero notifications sent.